The Purchase Page 9

  “I won't be denied,” he muttered, but he had to sit back for a moment and try to come up with another plan. He began to think as hard as he'd ever thought before, so hard that he began to develop a headache, but he kept thinking anyway.

  As he thought, he stared at the dead woman's frozen hand.

  There has to be a way to get that coin free, he told himself. I need it. One coin might not be enough, and even if it is, I want two, damn it!

  Finally, slowly, an idea began to form in his mind. If he could get the woman off the back of the cart, he could carry her into the cabin and set her by the hearth, and then he could get a really huge fire roaring. She'd have to thaw then, and the coin would slip free like candy from a child's hand. The idea made so much sense, he was surprised he hadn't thought of it sooner, but he was grateful that at least he'd come up with a solution eventually. All he had to do was get the woman into the cabin and then everything would be okay.

  He leaned forward.

  At that moment, an icy hand reached around and clamped itself over his mouth.

  Shocked, Munver stared straight ahead for a moment, not daring to turn and see his assailant. He remained completely still, not even summoning the strength to move so much as a muscle, before slowly he felt another hand reaching out to touch his left shoulder. He could hear a creaking sound now, coming from a little way back, but he told himself that he had to be wrong, that none of this could actually be happening.

  If you look, it'll make it more real, he told himself, even as he started trembling with fear. The frozen hand was starting to move up his face, toward his broken nose. Don't give in. You beat the madness once. You can do it again.

  He gritted his teeth.

  He clenched his fists.

  Suddenly he heard laughter ringing out; uproarious laughter, filling the air all around. It took a moment before he could pinpoint the source of that laughter. It wasn't coming from behind. Instead, he looked toward the cabin and saw Garrett's grinning face through the broken window pane. It was Garrett – despite missing one side of his face – who would laughing so hard, hard enough that his whole torso shook even as he remained pinned to the chair by the knife's blade. It was Garrett, a man who had died several hours earlier, who now laughed and laughed as Munver stared at him in horror.

  Finally, unable to fight back any longer, Munver turned and saw the face of the frozen dead man staring at him.

  “No!” Munver screamed, pulling away and lunging past the figure, crashing down off the back of the cart and landing in the snow, then scrambling to his feet and desperately wading toward the distant trees.

  Garrett's laughter seemed to follow him, hanging in the air all around, and Munver stumbled every few steps in his increasingly panicked attempt to escape. After a moment he felt as if the laughter had begun burrowing into his mind, and he had to clamp his hands over his ears in a desperate attempt to silence Garrett's mocking tones. Even this failed to work, and finally Munver dropped to his knees in the snow. He squeezed his eyes tight shut and bowed his head, but the laughter – though muffled slightly by his hands on his ears – continued unabated.

  “It's not real!” Munver yelled, now trying to use his own voice to push Garrett's laugh away. “It wasn't real before, and it's not real now!”

  Yet still the laughter rang out, burrowing into Munver's heart and soul, forcing him to remain on his knees despite his desperation to get away. He lost track of how long he remained on his knees, but he was starting to feel as if the last of his sanity was dripping away. And then, just as he was certain his mind was about to crack, the terrible laughter suddenly stopped.

  Munver stayed completely still for a moment, before opening his eyes. His immediate relief, however, was countered by the sudden realization that an icy hand was resting on his right shoulder.

  “No!” he shouted, stumbling to his feet and rushing forward again, racing toward the trees.

  Before he could manage more than two paces, however, the laughter returned. Munver puts his hands over his ears again, and then he tripped and fell, landing face-first in the snow. Barely able to get back onto his knees, he screamed as he tried to drown out Garrett's mocking voice, but the laughter seemed to become louder and louder in response. The more Munver fought back, the more the laughter tightened its grip on his mind.

  And then it stopped again.

  Munver continued to scream for a moment longer, but then he fell silent again.

  The air all around was quiet, but – just as before – a frozen hand was resting on his shoulder, this time on the left side. It was if, every time he tried to run, Munver was being cut down by the laughter, giving the frozen man enough time to catch up. Munver stared straight ahead for a few seconds, seeing the tree-line that remained at once both tantalizingly close and terrifyingly far away, but now he was starting to fear that even reaching the tree-line would not be enough. Even if he made it all the way to the trail, would the laughter still be following him and forcing his mind to the brink of madness?

  Determined to at least try, he stumbled to his feet and stepped forward, but of course the laughter immediately returned and Munver slumped back down. This time, since he'd barely moved at all, it took only a few seconds for the laughter to stop and for the hand to return – this time on the left side again – to his shoulder.

  The horror was never going to end.

  Too exhausted and terrified to try again, Munver remained on his knees for a moment before slowly reaching down and slipping a hand into his pocket. He fumbled for a moment, before taking out the gold coin. As he looked at the coin in the palm of his hand, he realized his dream of revenge was slipping away. Without the coin, he'd never be able to go home and prove himself to all the doubters, and he'd never be able to stand up to all the mocking bullies, and he'd never gain the company of the beautiful Angelica Graft. In an instant, that whole perfect future slipped away and Munver was left kneeling in the snow with the coin in his hand.

  Slowly, bitterly, he held the coin over his shoulder.

  “Take it,” he said, with tears in his eyes. “If you want it so much, then take it.”

  He waited, and a moment later he felt the coin being slipped from between his fingers. Then, slowly, the frozen hand left his shoulder, and he began to hear a creaking sound heading further away, accompanied by the rustle of steps in the snow. The dead woman's body had remained frozen solid, yet evidently the dead man had – perhaps through force of will-power alone – pushed himself to walk around, albeit very slowly and weakly. And as Munver remained on his knees, no longer hearing Garrett's hideous laughter, he could not quite bring himself to turn and watch the frozen dead man walk away.

  Nothing could be more horrific than the image that was already in his mind.

  He remained on his knees for so long, he was actually shivering by the time he realized the creaking sound had stopped. He'd heard a faint bump just a few minutes earlier, as if something had climbed onto the cart. In his mind's eye, Munver imagined the dead man slowly settling down next to the woman, squeezing his hand around the coin and then putting his arm around his companion, returning to the state in which he'd been when Munver had first pulled the covers away on the previous night. That whole image seemed preposterous, of course, yet it remained in Munver's mind until he began to realize that he was himself in danger of freezing to death.

  Slowly, he got to his feet, telling himself that it was time to walk to the trail. At the same time, however, he couldn't bring himself to leave without at least looking back one final time at the cabin, so he turned.

  Sure enough, the dead man was back on the cart, with his arm once more stretched across the woman.

  It's time to go, Munver realized. You can't stay here. You'll have to make your fortune somewhere else.

  A moment later, however, he was about to turn away when his gaze fell one final time upon the face of Richard Garrett. The laughter had been over for a while now, but Garrett's face was still visible through the br
oken window and Munver fancied that the dead man's remaining eye was fixed in his direction. He wanted to laugh, to mock Garrett, but all the mischief had drained from his soul. He felt utterly empty, as if there were no point on going on. And the longer he looked at Garrett's face, the more he realized that he could no longer deny what had happened over the past twelve hours.

  He had seen the dead walk.

  He had heard the dead speak and laugh.

  He had felt the dead touch his shoulder.

  All his life, Stuart Munver had lived for glory, for the tangible, for things he could touch and eat and use. There had never been any question, in his mind, of right and wrong, or of any great moral force. Whenever he'd heard people speak of spirits, or of another life beyond this one, he'd smirked at such idiotic ideas. He'd lied and stolen, even killed, with no thought that he might one day face any kind of judgment from his actions. So long as he could get away with things in the here and now, that was all that had ever mattered to him. He had been certain, without ever quite putting the notion into so many words, that the consequences of his actions existed in this world and this world alone, and that beyond death there was nothing but silence and rot.

  Now he saw that this was not true.

  Richard Garrett had died, yet he had returned to bring torment. The dead man on the back of the cart had been frozen for some time, yet he had risen when wronged and he had sought the return of his gold coin. This he had achieved. Some greater force, beyond anything Munver could understand, seemed to have arranged matters behind the scenes, and had made absolutely certain that a stolen coin had been returned to its owner. Munver didn't understand all of this, of course. He knew now that he never could. Yet he saw enough to realize that he had lived his whole life in the most heinous manner possible, and he realized that upon his eventual death he would most certainly be judged for every wrong he'd committed.

  This realization brought horror to his soul, such that he could see no chance of hope. Even apologies would be hollow and worthless.

  He looked around for a moment, trying to work out what to do next, but there was nothing. How could he live the rest of his life like this, knowing full well that in the end he would face the consequences of his wrongdoing? He tried to motivate himself, to think of revenge and of home and of Angelica Graft, but suddenly none of these things gave him any gratification, not anymore. It was all hopeless, all a waste, all just a way of delaying the inevitable moment of judgment. He could not laugh at this, nor could he smile.

  And then he remembered the woman on the cart.

  He'd tried to thaw her nether region, so that he could have his way with her. At the time, the endeavor had felt exciting, like an opportunity he couldn't possibly pass up. He remembered the unbearable lust that had filled his body, and the complete lack of concern he'd felt as he'd tried to mount his target. Now the whole thing seemed impossible, and he couldn't quite believe that he'd been so monstrous. He'd even laughed, before, whereas now he wept, and he knew deep down that no amount of repentance would ever suffice. He had been that kind of man, all his life.

  Finally, he realized that there was only one thing he could do.

  On unsteady legs that threatened to betray him at any moment, he somehow staggered back toward the cabin. He felt no fear now, for he felt no hope either, and the two went together. Fear without hope was merely certainty. He had meant to find a rope, but then he spotted the chain hanging from the front of Garrett's cart and he supposed that this would do just as well. He loosened the chain, and then he dragged it back across the clearing until he reached one of the larger trees that marked the start of the forest.

  And then he began to climb.

  The chain was heavy, heavy enough to slow him, but not heavy enough to stop him. He climbed carefully and methodically, performing his actions almost in an automatic manner. There was no emotion in him at all, save for a haunted understanding that he had misunderstood the entirety of existence so very badly. Having never been a smart man, or at least having never considered himself to be smart, he barely felt like Stuart Munver anymore. He just wanted to get things over with, and to begin his punishment as soon as possible. How could he live otherwise?

  Once he was up in the tree, he began to loop the chain around one of the branches, and soon he had constructed a crude noose. He had never made a noose before, so he did not know whether this one would work, but he supposed it would do the job sooner or later so he carefully slipped the chain around his neck. Then he looked toward the cabin one more time and thought of Garrett's mocking laughter, but he was relieved that all he heard was the faint rustle of snow falling all around.

  “I'm sorry,” he whispered. “I'm so, so sorry.”

  And then, with no further ado, he threw himself off the branch.

  Eighteen

  Today

  “It's odd,” Catherine Chandler said as the corpse was slowly lowered from the tree, “but the way the chain's constructed, I don't think it would have broken his neck.”

  “What happened, then?” Levant asked, watching the gruesome sight as the surprisingly well-preserved body was carefully set down on the ground. “Did he just hang there and wait to die?”

  Chandler grimaced for a moment.

  “Well,” she muttered, “you said it, not me.”

  They stood for a moment in silent contemplation of the man's awful fate. If the makeshift noose hadn't snapped his neck, he would have endured a long, painful death up there. Perhaps he could have freed himself, but evidently he had not done so; perhaps there had been no way, or perhaps he had been resigned to his fate. Either way, the idea of a man starving to death, dangling from a tree, filled both Chandler and her professor with a sense of dread, and neither of them really knew what to say next.

  “He was an ugly bugger, wasn't he?” Levant continued finally, tilting his head to get a better view of the corpse's features. “Is that something else, or was his face bloodied around the nose when he died?”

  “It looks that way,” Chandler replied, “but I won't know for certain until I've carried out a proper examination.” She stared at the body for a moment longer, before turning to Levant. “So does this do anything to dent your theory about the site?”

  “About the robbery gone wrong, you mean?” Levant asked. “It was only a working theory, but yes, I still think it's rather likely. I might have some of the details a little wrong, but the overall idea is almost certainly in the correct ballpark. This fellow, for example, looks to have been hauled up like a common criminal, using this rather makeshift contraption. That tells us something.”

  Chandler crouched down and took a closer look at the dead man's face. She knew – from all the lectures she'd attended over the years in Doctor Levant's class, and from all the seminars and books – that she had to stay focused on what was right in front of her. She had to work methodically. At the same time, something in her gut was telling her that Levant's version of events didn't sit quite right, as if deep down she somehow knew that there was more to what had happened at the site.

  Suddenly a beeping sound rang out, and Levant muttered something as he reached into his jacket pocket and took out his cellphone. He looked at the screen for a moment, and then he answered.

  “I'm still there,” he said, sounding a little irritated. “I'll be going back to the hotel shortly.”

  He listened, and then he furrowed his brow.

  “Margaret, I can barely hear you,” he continued, “the reception out here is lousy. I'll call you from the hotel.”

  He listened again.

  “I didn't make any of that out,” he said with a sigh. “I'll call you from the hotel, okay? From. The. Hotel.”

  With that, he cut the call and slipped the phone back into his pocket.

  “Keep me posted,” he said to Chandler, before turning and walking away. “I shall be very interested to hear about any discoveries you make here, Ms. Chandler. I might even be willing to help you out a little. So much so, I intend to
stay at the hotel for another night, so as to make myself useful. You should be very pleased to have my expertise available. This should be a real boon for you.”

  “Thank you,” she murmured, but in truth she was lost in thought.

  Reaching out, she almost touched the dead man's broken nose, but at the last moment she held back. Instead, she stared for a moment at a face that looked to have been beaten and bloodied some time before he died. At the same time, there was something almost noble about his expression, and Chandler found herself wondering what kind of person would end up hanging from a tree, all alone out in the middle of nowhere? At that particular moment, she didn't even know his name.

  “Who were you?” she whispered. “How did you end up like this?”

  Nineteen

  “I found a finger,” Chad Clark said a few minutes later, holding up a small piece of bone that he'd discovered near the rear of the cart. “Or part of one, anyway. Doctor Levant, do you think it just fell off and rolled away?”

  Levant, who'd been on his way back to his car but who'd stopped to take another look at the bones on the cart, squinted as he saw the piece of bone in Clark's hands. He didn't really want to get involved in the nitty-gritty of the case, but he had to admit that a solitary displaced finger piqued his interest.

  “Just that one piece?” Levant replied, raising a skeptical eyebrow. “Seems rather odd for it to have just rolled away of its own accord.”

  “I know, but why would anyone cut a single figure off a dead body?” Clark nodded toward the other side of the cart. “There's an old saw over there. It's pretty rusty, but do you think maybe it was used to remove the finger?”

  “I wouldn't have the faintest idea,” Levant said, “but make sure you bag the finger properly and have it analyzed. Ms. Chandler's leading this project, I'm sure she's warned you to follow all rules to the letter.”